07 February 2011

Knowles Collection Update

The Knowles Collection continues to have incredible growth. In September of 2010 the collection was updated to include the records of 140,000 people. Today, the collection has again been updated to now include the genealogical records for more than 195,000 people.

The collection which is comprised of 5 individual databases has seen growth in all areas of the world. When it was first introduced on Familysearch.org in August of 2007 it held the records of less than 7000 Jews, almost all from the British Isles. Today over 60 different countries are represented and over 10,000 records are added monthly. The growth and support from the genealogical community has been wonderful. The individual databases are:

Jews of the British Isles 104,100 people

Jews of the Americas 53,000 people

Jews of Europe 33,200 people

Jews of the Caribbean 4,500 people

Jews of Africa and the Orient 800 people

The collection, which is freely accessible, can either be downloaded as a Gedcom or can be individually search. To find the links for doing this visit The Knowles Collection wiki page at Family Search Wiki, which is located at https://wiki.familysearch.org/en/The_Knowles_Collection.

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Why the Knowles Collection?

From an early age I have been trying to find as much information as I could about my gggrandfather, Morris DavidRosenbaum, a Polish Jew. In my search and through my work as a Reference Consultant in the British Research unit at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah, I have compiled records of The Jewish people. This collection, linking Jewish families, is available free to all. Hopefully, people will come together to share the stories of their own families.

Size of the databases (28 Jan 2015)

Jews of British Isles 208,349Jews of Europe380,637Jews of North America489,400Jews of South America and Caribbean21,351Jews of Africa & Orient37,618Jews of South Pacific21,518

Total 1,158,873

Growth and Change

In the 7 years since the Knowles Collection was first published, the numbers have climbed from just over 7,500 to over 1,000,000as of April of 2014. So many of our ancestors left their native lands for new homes. Because of that movement the collection will now be in 6 different databases. All of them will be under the Knowles Collection umbrella. They are Jewsof The British Isles; Jews of the North America; Jews of Europe; Jews of South America and the Caribbean; and Jews of Africa and the Orient and the newest one, Jews of the Southern Pacific.. This is a great indication of how universal our families are, and of how much still needs to be done.